


not damned for nothing

by sinnabar (fishtank)



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Episode Related, Gen, the gang goes to hell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-08
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 10:08:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6190777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishtank/pseuds/sinnabar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>It makes a twisted sort of sense that they should die the same way they lived.</em> The gang gets real.</p>
            </blockquote>





	not damned for nothing

**Author's Note:**

> So I wrote this in like a day and a half and it's basically just my predictions/speculations/hopes/dreams for what might happen in the finale with the gang all trapped together in a small room that's slowly filling with water. CW for implied character death and mention of suicide, as well the gang's usual bigotry and grossness. You know the drill.
> 
> Title is from Sartre's "No Exit", which was subtly referenced in the final scene of part one.

Dee’s throat is raw from screaming and her hand is smarting like a bitch from a solid half hour of banging on the locked door of the brig, even though she knows it’s futile by now. There’s been nothing but eerie silence from the rest of the cruise liner for the last ten minutes, on the heels of a flurry of panicked activity that she can only assume was the rest of the passengers abandoning ship and leaving them down here to drown.

Also, there’s already water beginning to seep under the bottom of the door, pooling around her shoes. She’s not an expert or anything, but she’s pretty sure the ocean is supposed to stay _outside_ the boat.

She can’t make herself stop, though, because if she stops… If she stops, she might as well just give up now; kill herself before the sea can take her.

“Hey, we’re in here! Would somebody please open the goddamn door?!”

“You’re wasting your time, Dee,” Mac says from where he’s huddled over in the opposite corner. “It’s pointless. Nobody’s coming for us. There’s nobody _left._ We’re gonna die here."

He laughs somewhat hysterically. So far openly gay nihilist Mac is actually proving to be more annoying than closeted religious Mac, something that Dee hadn’t even thought was possible. Dennis seems to agree with her, because he turns on Mac instantly, radiating that tightly controlled rage that normally means he’s about five minutes away from a full-on breakdown.

“What are you talking about, this is all your fault in the first place. If you hadn’t let the goddamn door close we wouldn’t be in this mess. Hell, if it wasn’t for you we wouldn’t even be on the goddamn boat!”

“I’m sorry, is it my fault you all fucked up and got yourselves thrown in here? Anyway, I had important news to tell you!”

“What, that you’re gay? Newsflash, asshole: we all knew. We’ve _always_ known. None of us gives a shit.”

Dee can’t listen to this anymore. She leans her forehead against the cool metal of the door and closes her eyes, as if that will somehow block out the squabbling of her fellow prisoners. No such luck. She can’t quite believe that she’s going to go out like this, trapped with these people, even though it makes a twisted sort of sense that they should die the same way they lived.

If there _is_ a God, he has one sick sense of humor, that’s for sure.

“Guys, guys, guys, can we all just please stop fighting?” Charlie says. “This isn’t us; this isn’t who we are. We just need to work together and I’m sure we’ll figure a way out of this.”

Dennis snorts. “God, just how stupid are you? This is _exactly_ who we are.”

“I was just saying –“

“Well _don’t_. Okay? Nobody asked for your opinion, and you know what else? No-one is ever going to, because you don’t know shit. You’re a goddamn janitor, and you can’t even read.”

“Hey, leave him alone! Don’t listen to him, Charlie,” Frank joins in, which, if anything, just seems to rile Dennis up even more.

“Stop defending him, Frank! God, why do you always have to take his side in everything? I’m so sick of the weird little relationship you two have going on. It’s not cute, it’s just creepy.”

“Well, what do you expect?” Frank yells back. “It’s not like you or your sister are my real kids; you’re both Bruce Mathis’s bastard monsters. With Charlie I’ve got a chance to do things over, to do it right this time.”

The persistent trickle of water into the small space seems even louder in the silence that follows. Dee notices absently that it’s around her ankles now, as she finally pulls herself away from the door to face the others. Dennis and Charlie are both gaping at Frank, who has that stupid expression on his face that he always gets in those rare moments of self-awareness when he knows he’s said something he shouldn’t have. Mac looks distinctly uncomfortable and just a tiny bit envious, the way he always does whenever the twisted Reynolds family tree comes up in conversation.

Dee doesn’t know what he has to be jealous about. Sometimes she thinks she’d give anything to not be a part of this family.

“Does that mean… are you, like, officially my dad?” Charlie asks eventually – hushed, like he’s afraid to actually voice the question out loud, even though he’s asked it a hundred times before now. “For real?”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Frank says evasively. “But, you know. It’s a distinct possibility. Probability, even.”

“Christ,” Dee mutters, because she’s pretty sure that means she fucked her stepbrother that one time – which, she’d always known it was a possibility, somewhere in the dark corner of her mind where she keeps all the things she doesn’t want to think about too hard, but having it confirmed is another matter entirely. If she’s about to die, she thinks she’d rather go to her grave in ignorance.

Still, she finds herself moving over to join the others, sinking down on the narrow bench next to Dennis. It’s like gravity, magnetic attraction; no matter how much she thinks she hates her brother, she can’t help but be drawn to him in situations like this. He’s her twin, after all. They’re made of the same flesh and bone, the same toxic blood coursing through both their veins.

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me this any of the, I don’t know, _dozens_ of times I asked before?!” Charlie demands, his voice reaching such an ear-splitting pitch that Dee cringes away from it. “I mean, what the hell, man?”

“I don’t know, Charlie. I guess we just had a pretty good thing going as it was, and I didn’t wanna mess that up,” Frank admits. “You’d start expecting me to be all fatherly and shit, and I was never any good at that.”

“Yeah, no shit,” Dennis says at pretty much the exact same time that Dee thinks it, and she can’t help the snort that escapes her.

“We’re fine just the way we are,” Frank continues, as though the interruption had never happened. “I gotta admit, though, it does feel pretty good, getting this shit off my chest."

“Maybe that’s what we all need,” Mac says, with that stupid earnest expression that Dee fucking hates. “If we’re gonna die anyway, I mean, we should probably clear the air. Confession is good for the soul, you know.”

“I thought you said God doesn’t exist,” Dee says, mostly just to needle at him. She hates the way he always tries to rationalize everything uncomfortable or inconvenient away so he doesn’t have to think about it; she wants him to feel the same terror and helplessness that she does right now instead of calmly sitting there talking about how they’re all going to die.

“No, yeah, he doesn’t,” Mac says impatiently, like they should all be doing a better job of keeping up. “It doesn’t matter, ‘cause it’s not really about God. It’s like… catharsis, or some shit.”

“Ooh, _catharsis._ There’s a ten-dollar word,” Dee mocks. “You sure you know what it means?”

“Do you?” Mac shoots back. As far as comebacks go, it’s pretty lame, but she’s actually not confident enough in her own definition to call him out on it.

Thankfully, Dennis comes to her rescue. “I think that’s a great idea, Mac. In fact, why don’t you start us off, show us how this whole confession thing works. Since you’re the expert and all.”

Mac blinks at him once, slowly. “Well, we’ve already been over the whole gay thing, so I don’t really have anything else to confess…”

Dennis laughs; a short, sharp bark of sound. “Oh, you are so full of shit. What, you think that just because you finally figured out you want to fuck dudes – which the rest of us have known for years, by the way – that you’re suddenly the most well-adjusted person here? Well, here’s a reality check for you: everything you tell yourself to get through the day is fake as shit. You don’t know karate, you can’t do a backflip; you’re not a badass, you’re a goddamn coward. And another thing, your dad doesn’t give a shit about you.”

“Oh, you want to go there?” Mac sneers – and he recovers quickly, Dee has to give him that. “You wanna bring our parents into this? At least my dad is _actually_ my dad, not just some dude who got tricked into raising me by his whore of a wife. And speaking of your mom, she was a pillhead bitch who had no problem banging me just to prove a point. That’s still the best sex I ever had, by the way.”

At this, Dennis lets out a snarl of inarticulate fury and lunges for Mac, apparently with every intention of clawing his eyes out. He’s impeded by the water, though, which is up to his knees by now, and Charlie intervenes to hold him back before he can actually reach his target, leaving him splashing about uselessly and spitting impotent threats. It’s kind of a pathetic sight, and maybe Dee should be on his side for this one, but she can’t deny that everything Mac said about their mom was pretty much on the money. Even if she does feel a little bit nauseous at the thought of them actually having sex.

“Wait a minute,” Frank interrupts the chaos. “You slept with my ex-wife?”

“Uh, yeah, dude. Haven’t we already been over this, like, a million times?”

“Seriously, man,” Dennis agrees. “You’re losing your goddamn mind.”

It’s a little unnerving, Dee thinks, how quickly he and Mac can go from being at each other’s throats to presenting a unified front from which to shit on the rest of them, but she’s more than used to it by now.

“I’m gonna let you go now,” Charlie says to Dennis, still watching him somewhat warily, “but you gotta promise that you’re not gonna murder anyone.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, give it a rest already,” Dennis mutters tiredly, snatching his arm out of Charlie’s grip. “I was never gonna kill him, just maybe rough him up a little bit. Although I don’t see what goddamn difference it makes, given that we’re all gonna drown in, oh, about another twenty minutes.”

“Shit,” Charlie says a little shakily, like the reality of the situation has only just hit him. “I can’t believe this is how it’s gonna go down. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye to the Waitress. Do you think anyone’s gonna tell her what happened to me?”

“I seriously doubt she’ll care either way,” Dee points out in the spirit of being honest with each other, and maybe it’s cruel but at the same time she thinks she’s probably doing him a favor. If there’s any kind of afterlife, it can’t be healthy to carry that amount of delusion into it.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“ _Seriously?_ ” Dennis snaps. “You seriously need this spelling out for you? It means that you’ve wasted over a decade of all our lives stalking some woman who hates you, whose _name_ you don’t even know, turning down all the sex you could have been having in that time, for _nothing_.”

“Why does everything always have to be about sex with you?” Charlie counters. “It’s not about that; it’s about love. She’s my soulmate, alright? And not that it’s any of your business, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been with other women in the meantime.”

“Oh, really? Name _one_ woman you’ve slept with since high school. Prostitutes don’t count.”

“Dee!” Charlie blurts out, and really, she should have seen this coming a mile off. “Dee and I had sex!”

“Thanks a lot, Charlie,” Dee says, feeling her cheeks heat up as the others all turn to gape at her. In truth, though, she’s actually kind of glad to have it out in the open. She’s also sort of surprised that Charlie has managed to keep it to himself for this long, but she’s not about to actually _say_ any of that. She still has her pride. “You promised you wouldn’t tell them.”

“So it’s true?” Dennis asks her. “Why the hell didn’t I know about this?”

He actually looks hurt, maybe even a little jealous, and that probably shouldn’t make her feel as pleased as it does. Dennis likes to think of himself as some kind of puppet master with complete control over all of their lives, can’t stand the thought of any of them having their own secrets that he isn’t privy to. That’s all it is.

“It was last year, after you drove the car into the river,” Dee shrugs. “We started hanging out more, and one thing led to another…”

“And you just ended up banging?!”

“Ew, Charlie, just how drunk _were_ you?” Mac says, wrinkling his nose in exaggerated disgust. Then: “Also, I can’t believe you broke our rule, bro!”

“What rule?”

“Don’t do that, you know exactly what rule I’m talking about! The rule that says none of us can bang other members of the gang, in case we end up messing up our group dynamic and shit.”

“Uh, I’m pretty sure that was never a rule,” Dee says.

Mac turns to Dennis for support, but he’s not likely to find any; Dennis looks just as bewildered as Dee feels. “Yeah, much as I hate to say it, she’s right,” he admits. “It’s just that Dee is the only girl, so it’s not like there’s a lot of opportunity for hookups within the group. But there’s never been a rule about it, dude.”

“Huh,” Mac says thoughtfully, “in that case…” He wades closer to Dennis, grabs a fistful of Dennis’s shirt and kisses him hard, and it’s at this point that Dee begins to wonder whether they haven’t already died, or if she’s stumbled into some bizarro alternate version of reality, because _what in the actual fuck._

Dennis lets it go on just a couple of seconds too long for plausible deniability before he pulls back. “What the hell is this? What are you doing right now?”

Mac sighs in apparent frustration. “I just found out that I’m gay like an hour ago and now it looks like I’m gonna die before I get the chance to actually do anything with that information, so could you please just let me have this?”

“Well, when you put it that way,” Dennis shrugs, and then they’re kissing again. If it was anybody else, Dee thinks, it might even be kind of sweet. As it is, it mostly just makes her want to gag.

“Wait, I’m confused,” Frank says. “Does this mean that Dennis is gay too?”

“Dennis is Dennis,” Dee mutters dismissively. “He’ll fuck anyone if they give him enough attention.” Then something else occurs to her. “Whoa, hold up, back up just one second there. Did you guys just admit that I’m a part of the gang?”

Mac peels himself away from Dennis with what looks like a considerable amount of effort to squint at her in confusion. “Dee, what the hell are you talking about? Like I’d ever say anything –”

“Oh, you so did!” Dee interrupts triumphantly. “You said ‘none of us can bang other members of the gang’, and then _you_ said,” she points at Dennis, “‘Dee’s the only girl’. You can’t take it back now, boners. I’m in the gang, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“Of course you’re in the gang, you’ve always been in the gang,” Charlie says. “Come on guys, just for once can we not do this thing where we all pretend we don’t like each other?”

Mac raises his hand. “Uh, no pretending necessary. I _don’t_ like Dee.”

“The feeling’s mutual, dick.”

“Okay, well, maybe some of us like each other more than others,” Charlie forges on, “but it doesn’t matter, right, ‘cause we’re family.”

_Some family,_ Dee thinks. Some crazy, fucked-up, incestuous, sorry excuse for a family. But Charlie isn’t done yet.

“Maybe you don’t always like your family, maybe sometimes they drive you so crazy that you wanna stab them just a little bit, or sneak a bag of rats in with them while they’re sleeping. It doesn’t matter, ‘cause if it comes down to us and the rest of the world, I’d choose us every time. I don’t care if you’re my real dad or not, Frank, okay? You’re right, what we have already is enough. And Dee, I’m glad that we banged. It was weird and awkward, and the whole sex thing in general still seems pretty suspect to me, but I don’t regret it.”

“Me neither,” Dee admits quietly. She’d thought at the time that if it wasn’t for the rest of the gang, their toxic influence polluting everything good in her life, then maybe she and Charlie could have worked out, but she thinks now that maybe that was disingenuous of her; maybe this is just who they are, and maybe that’s okay.

“Wow, Charlie,” Mac says after an awkward beat. “That was actually pretty inspiring, dude.”

“Yeah,” Dennis agrees. “And for you, so eloquent.”

He might be talking to Charlie, but he’s looking right at Dee with the weirdest expression on his face, and it’s starting to freak her out a little. “Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it. You do not get to shit on me right now, so unless you have something nice to say for once in our goddamn lives, you can save it.”

“Oh, come on, I don’t _always_ shit on you,” Dennis says. “I’ve said nice things to you before. Remember when I chased your plane down, when we thought you were going to L.A. to be a star?”

As if she needs reminding. “I remember you saying whatever you thought was necessary to get me to bring you along because you didn’t know these assholes were screwing with us both. Is that what you’re talking about?”

“Yeah, well, I meant it, okay?” Dee stares at him in shock, sure she must have misheard. He’s actually starting to turn pink around the ears, determinedly avoiding her gaze; it reminds her of when they were in high school and does weird things to her insides. “You’re my sister, Dee, of course I love you. We’re twins. Everything else is just… background noise.”

She thinks she might actually have preferred it if he’d insulted her. At least she’s used to that, has spent almost her entire life building up defenses against it. She has no idea how to deal with her brother actually being _nice_ to her.

When she doesn’t respond for several seconds, Dennis nudges her with a bony elbow aimed at her ribs. “You’re supposed to say it back. Say you love me too.”

“You already know I do, asshole,” Dee chokes. To her utter horror, she realizes she can feel hot tears beginning to prick at the back of her eyelids, and blinks them away furiously. They’re all in this mess together, dammit; she refuses to be the first to break down.

“You know,” Frank says musingly, “I remember when the two of you were kids, you were inseparable. You used to spend every waking moment together, throw a tantrum if we ever tried to separate you for more than five minutes. I know I wasn’t exactly the best father to you back then, but for what it’s worth, I’m glad I’ve been given the chance to get to know the people you’ve grown into.”

“What, a couple of deadbeat losers?” Dee says – mostly to cover her surprise, because she’s pretty sure that’s the nicest thing Frank’s ever said to either of them.

“Christ,” Dennis mumbles. “This can’t be real. This is just some whacked-out dream I’m having, right? I mean, it has to be. There’s no way Frank actually just said something halfway sincere.”

Frank just shrugs. “We’re all gonna be dead in about ten more minutes. What have I got to lose?”

“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s just unacceptable to me,” Dennis snaps, and Dee thinks that this is it: the breaking point. “There’s no way this is how I die, trapped in some godforsaken boat jail with you people. I’m supposed to live forever.”

He’s verging on hysterical, and Dee doesn’t even think about it: she wraps her fingers around his wrist, some leftover muscle memory from when they were kids and she was the only one who could calm him down. Dennis shifts, turning towards her ever so slightly, and Dee changes her grip so that their hands are clasped, fingers interlaced, clinging tightly to one another. After a moment, Mac takes Dennis’s other hand, and then Charlie takes Dee’s, and Frank takes Charlie’s, the five of them linked together in a human chain.

Frank eyes Mac warily, even as he stretches out his free hand towards him. “You better not infect me with all your gay diseases.”

“I would rather eat my own face off,” Mac says, and then he grabs Frank’s hand with more force than strictly necessary, closing the circle.

Dee looks at each of them in turn, sees the fear that they’re all trying so hard to keep at bay, that’s probably mirrored on her own face. “I hate you all so goddamn much,” she says, and it’s only a fraction of the truth. She hates them, and she loves them, and she can’t escape them – and God knows she’s tried. For better or worse, she’s tied to these four men, condemned to spend the rest of her life stuck with them.

Fortunately, it’s looking as though ‘the rest of her life’ isn’t going to be very long at all. Frank is already treading water just to keep his head above the surface, and it’s only going to be a matter of minutes before the rest of them follow suit. It’s painfully obvious by now that there’s no rescue coming for them, and once the water level reaches the ceiling, it’s all over.

It’s something Dee has wondered before, what it might feel like to drown. During her worst days in college, and then on the psych ward, she’d spend hours idly fantasizing about it, just lining her pockets with stones and wading out into the nearest body of water. She’d never had the will to actually go through with it, though; she’s heard that it’s one of the most painful ways to die, and she’s never been a big fan of pain. Already the cold is seeping down into her bones, her fingers so numb that she can barely feel the grip that Dennis and Charlie have on them anymore.

Apparently they’re all done confessing, because the only sound is the rushing of the water. It’s almost peaceful, if she tunes everything else out.

Dee closes her eyes, and drifts.

**Author's Note:**

> Five-way dialogue is hard, yo. I'm definitely most confident writing Dennis, Dee and Mac, and I think that probably shows, but I tried to get the overall balance within the group across as much as I could.
> 
> Also, I fully expect this to be jossed on Wednesday night. Though you never know.


End file.
